I’ve been a convert since 1985. My first computer was a Commodore 128 the year before, a marvel of sorts because it actually displayed a full line of printed type in one line on the monitor. Since then, I’ve had six Macs and a SuperMac clone.

In 1985 our union local was looking for two computers to run our finances and type our grievances, and, I hoped, layout our monthly newspaper. We looked at half a dozen computers and then a Mac Plus. It didn’t even look like a computer. The screen was inside the computer. It had this odd little device called a mouse that opened files with two clicks – no command lines using punctuation marks accessible only with the option key. No evenly spaced, badly formed, squarish white letters on a green or blue screen. Black letters on a white screen and – oh my God – serif fonts, sans-serif fonts, typewriter fonts, bolds, italics, outlines, shadows or any combination thereof, scalable from 8 to 120 points. And no funny marks to show where different type started and ended, but a screen that displayed the actual font, that showed you what the printed version would look like. Then the salesman showed us PageMaker and I think I wet myself.

That was Steve Jobs’ secret. He wasn’t designing computers for people who just wanted to type letters or print a list of their records and video tapes, or industrial efficiency experts, or geeks to spend evenings and weekends dismantling to add features they’d never use and only another geek would care about, or posers who just wanted it next to their desk so people would think they were tech savvy.

He wanted to build computers that you’d want to use and could use – now, not after six months of classes and a fifty percent increase in your vocabulary. Magic machines to organize your work, do things easier, do useful things you’d never thought of before and express yourself in ways you never dreamed possible. Steve Jobs’ three visions were that computers had to be useful and usable, that form is part of function, and that better beats cheaper every time.

And, just for the record, Bill Gates played a big part in that vision. Woz designed the hardware but Bill designed the key apps that made the first Macs the technological miracle they were. I wish there was somewhere you could go and try out the word processing and spreadsheet programs on a Commodore 128 and then Microsoft Word 1.0 and Excel 1.0 on a Mac Plus. Microsoft Office has come a long way, but it’s still a matter of degrees. The difference between the first Macs and everything before them wasn’t even a difference of kind, it was a paradigm shift.

If I’d told someone in 1981 what computers and their technological offspring would look like and what they’d do in 2011, I’d have spent time in a rubber room. Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Gordon Moore, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Steve Zuckerman and lots of others played major roles in the revolution of the last three decades. But Steve Jobs was the one and only essential component. Don’t ever believe that his skills as a pitchman were anything more than collateral entertainment. It was what he was pitching that made Apple the gold standard for all the electronic marvels he envisioned and led talented people to build.